Monday, July 22, 2013

#44 session

Today's session went well. It was very strenuous, fighting against the hypertropia. The saccades went splendidly as well.

Things are still moving forward, it appears. Also, today when I was at work, I noticed that suppression seems to be stripping away in a pretty obvious way. A concern that I have is whether or not the double images are going to be perfectly accommodated.

I recently heard about a new method for treating strabismus which I find particularly interesting. Here is the link.

Researchers found a way to quantify suppression--and their method is amazingly clever. Basically they give each eye different input. The normal eye is given input which shows dots moving about randomly. The lazy eye is given input which shows dots moving together in a straight line. If the lazy eye is suppressing, it should be very difficult for the person to see the dots moving in a straight line. So to fix that, the contrast of the lazy eye input is bumped up--increasing the power of the signal relative to the noise input going to the other eye--until the brain notices it. The threshold at which the contrast of the linear-moving dots allows the subject to notice the linear-moving dots is what the researchers call unity, and they show that it is a reliable measure of suppression.

With practice, the brain is able to notice the linear-moving dots against the background with less and less contrast, until the contrast matches that of the noisy randomly moving dots. At that point, the eyes should have parity with one another. One of the guys who participated in this study developed stereopsis in five fucking weeks!!!! You can see why this has piqued my interest.

So this seems to be the best conceivable way to get rid of suppression. But the paper doesn't address eye movement which is a little worrying to me. If you have both eyes fully powered on, and you don't have full control, that means you could have have some severe suicide-inducing diplopia.

I may try to make a program that does something to model what the paper described sometime in the future, but for now syntonics seems to be working great.